Fleming, Nézet-Séguin release recording on climate change – KIRO 7 News Seattle

NEW YORK – (AP) – Your travel and appearances have been limited during the pandemic. Soprano Renée Fleming and Yannick Nézet-Séguin thought about songs they could play together on a piano and concluded on a topic of climate change.

“I’ve pondered for years how romantic poetry and song literature framed every human experience,” she said, “and of course I was horrified last year when Mother Nature made her misfortune very loud and clear.”

Their collaboration resulted in Voice of Nature – The Anthropocene, published October 8th by Decca Classics. It contains the first recordings of three contemporary works, Kevin Puts’ “Evening”, Nico Muhly’s “Endless Space” and Caroline Shaw’s “Aurora Borealis”, together with compositions from 1844 by Gabriel Fauré, Edvard Grieg, Reynaldo Hahn and Franz Liszt.

Fleming did not make public appearances from March 2020 to June 2021 because of the pandemic and stayed at her Virginia home. Until last July, Nézet-Séguin largely limited himself to appearances near his home in Montreal, when he led the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in a Beethoven symphony cycle in Baden-Baden.

They chose the repertoire mainly through the exchange of texts and voicemails. Their schedules usually do not leave time for joint recordings.

“Even when we do nothing, we always do something,” said Nézet-Séguin, music director of the New York Metropolitan Opera, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Orchester Métropolitain in Montreal.

“Slowing down that much,” he continued, “I think it got all of us artists to think about what’s important, what the priorities are, and what time we need to reserve. For me, a project like this with an artist I love and admire so much, like Renee, is something that I need more time to practice for and more time to get used to in the pieces. And that is so good for my soul, and it showed me that it is important to capture those moments as an artist in order to do this. And it’s also important to hopefully speak to the world about the subject. “

Puts’ composition with text from a poem by Dorianne Laux was written shortly before the recording sessions at Verizon Hall in Philadelphia from April 27th to May 1st. The 49-year-old American had composed “The Brightness of Light”, a cycle of songs that premiered in Tanglewood in July 2019, based on his earlier “Letters from Georgia O’Keefe”.

While Fleming played her last central repertoire role in May 2017, she is recording new works. And Puts composes “The Hours,” based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, which will be released on May 18-23.

After Nézet-Séguin’s melancholy introduction to “Evening”, Fleming conjures: “Midnight flows down mercilessly, no matter how many have perished under the trees” and concludes: “We know that the land disappears under the sea, islands swallowed up like prehistoric fish / We knows that we are lost, done, doomed and yet the light reaches us, falls on our shoulders even now, even here where the moon is hidden from us, although the stars are so far away. “

Fleming sang “Aurora Borealis” at Carnegie Hall in 2017, a work that describes “Streaks in the Sky … that’s what I was looking for tonight”. She and Nézet-Séguin hope to be able to perform some of these songs in concert at some point.

“For me, the piano has a different meaning now,” he said. “It’s not so much because I want to do solo recitals. That’s because I want to sit down and do projects like this with Renée. This is a dream for me, so I’ll make room. “

Nézet-Séguin’s piano was mainly limited to rehearsals. He recorded Schubert’s “Winterreise” with mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, which was released last spring by Warner Classics, and is hoping for a public role on the keyboard.

“I’m just trying to listen to what you’re doing and I’m trying to do this legato the way you do it, so perfectly,” he said to Fleming. “I’ve developed my relationship with the piano over the past year and a half because I’ve always wanted to keep it a secret. When I was a pianist and trained as a pianist, I always saw conducting as my life. But I never gave up the piano entirely. And I was tempted to come back to it sometimes because I thought who am I kidding? You never have time to practice. Why should I do that? But I believe it will help me become a better conductor since I can play now. “

Fleming hopes the message of these songs will get through.

“I’m proud of this project,” she said. “I never say that about my recordings.”

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